Sony

It seems that Sony is going to play the contrarian this year in terms of smartphone designs. While everyone is scrambling to banish bezels from their phones’ faces, Sony is still sticking to lots of them in its upcoming Xperia XZ1 and XZ1 Compact. With the latter, however, it seems to be going above and beyond the call of duty. While the trend for the past years have been to make phones impossibly thin, based on these leaked 3D renders, Sony will make the Xperia XZ1 Compact uncharacteristically thick instead.

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Following a recent leak, Sony has officially detailed the features PlayStation 4 owners can expect to get in the upcoming system update 5.0. The firmware is currently in beta testing, and it brings a wide variety of changes, not the least of which is a redesigned master and sub-account system that makes it easier for families to manage their accounts. Changes are also coming for VR, managing friends, and more.

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With IFA just a few weeks away, mobile companies are already preparing to show off their late 2017 lineup. Which also means we’re bound to get even more leaks and teasers for those products. Case in point is the Xperia XZ1, which has posed for the camera, unofficially of course. The 2017 successor to last year’s somewhat high-end smartphone looks almost exactly identical to the Xperia XZ, but, as they say, looks can be deceiving.

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The focus these days on self-driving smart cars and built-in Apple CarPlay or Android Auto may seem to make more focused and dedicated in-car audio systems obsolete. Sony’s latest announcement reminds car owners and lovers that there’s always room for both. In particular, the new XAV-AX200 receiver supports both infotainment platforms, just like its predecessor, the XAV-AX100 pictured above. Sony, however, also throws in a feature that may sound old school by now: a DVD player.

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A couple of weeks back, Sony announced some bad news for PlayStation Plus users in the EU. At the end of August, prices on PlayStation Plus subscriptions are going to rise, somewhat significantly in some cases. This price hike follows a similar one in the US last year, and as you can probably imagine, PlayStation Plus users aren't exactly happy with the added expense.

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With the sheer number of different Dualshock 4 controllers available for the PS4, some of them aren't going to be quite as good as others. Case in point: Sony's new limited edition PlayStation F.C. Dualshock 4. The controller is being released to celebrate the beginning of soccer (or football) season, but its design leaves something to be desired.

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Sony’s Xperia smartphones are, to be honest, overpriced for what they’re really worth. Make no mistake, they are as premium as they look (depending on your aesthetic tastes), but they cost a whole lot more than its closest rivals. Sony might have noticed that, though a tad too late. It has just slashed a good chunk off the price of the Xperia XZ Premium putting it in line with the likes of the Galaxy S8, though barely a month shy of the next round of flagship smartphones, including the Galaxy Note 8, LG V30, and the new iPhones.

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Sony’s smartphones have a lot going for them, but they haven’t received welcome arms in the US for a couple of reasons. One of those is the price, which Sony sometimes, but not always, cuts a few months after a release. But one of its most glaring flaws, especially on high-end smartphones, is the fingerprint scanner. Or rather, the lack of it. It seems that Sony might have finally found a way to solve, by simply relocating the fingerprint scanner to the back, as seen in these alleged Xperia XZ1 and Xperia XZ Compact photos.

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It was almost exactly a month ago that Sony began adding the first PlayStation 4 games to its PlayStation Now subscription service. With that initial batch, 20 PS4 games were added to PS Now, with some greats like God of War 3 Remastered and Saints Row IV present on the list. Today, Sony is adding another 19 games, nearly doubling the number of PlayStation 4 games available on the service.

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It still may or may not make sense, but Sony does seem to have a “Compact” flagship ready to ship soon. Actually, we’re not yet sure if it will indeed be called the Xperia XZ Compact, but the Sony G8441, which is its more formal name, has shown up at Geekbench after its appearance in AnTuTu about a year ago. And while there is less information to be gleaned in this new leak, it does support the image of a smartphone with high-end specs but a mid-range screen.

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Every new Android release is pretty much a guessing game for Android users. Will my phone/tablet get the update or not? Some OEMs, like LG, love to shout how they’re first in line, though usually only for the latest model or two. Some manufacturers tend to be more silent and just surprise their users when, or if, it does happen. Sony is more on the latter, though it does have a track record of rolling out major updates, though not as fast as one would hope. Still, it’s always welcome news to hear that your phone is eligible for the update, as listed by this new leak.

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The 50s called and they want their tapes back. Forget crystals, holograms, or even DNA. The storage solution of the future might come from the pass. And that’s not an exaggeration either. Sony and IBM have joined several of their technologies and innovations together in order to make a palm-sized magnetic tape cartridge capable of holding as much as 330 TB of data. An achievement considering that a comparable cartridge only holds 15 TB at most.

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